Organizations have become increasingly dependent on information collection and analysis in today's information age. Information gathering use to be done, if at all, primarily on print media filed in various physical locations, thus making data collection and subsequent analysis a process fraught with errors and manually intensive. Today information collected on traditional print media is likely converted into various usable electronic forms and stored in an information repository.
In an effort to facilitate better information collection and analysis a variety of vendors have provided software and hardware services for collecting, storing, and analyzing information. For example, a data warehouse assimilates and indexes information from a variety of disparate information repositories (e.g., electronic files, databases, and the like) to present a single organizational view of information.
The true value of an organization's data warehouse or information repository, however, depends on information quality (e.g., collection accuracy, types and variety of data, time coverage of data collected, and usable structure of data). Value also depends on information maturity. Information maturity can be viewed as error free and robust information having an up-to-date electronic structure with information needed by an organization to maximize the organization's internal knowledge base about its business. Accordingly, the traditional phrase “garbage in garbage out” still applies in the information industry.
Organizations and the economy are continually evolving with the ever changing market. Therefore, organizations find it extremely challenging to continuously improve the quality and maturity of their legacy information because of their limited organizational time, capital, and resources. As a result, many organizations are not aware of the true value in improving the quality and maturity of their information, since taking on such an exercise appears on the surface to be painfully expensive and time consuming.
Therefore, there exist a need to provide techniques for automatically modeling information quality and maturity. With such techniques, organizations can practically and efficiently analyze, plan, and move their information quality and maturity from a current state to a more desirable state.